June 23rd, 2019

Healing The trauma of generations of addiction:
You grow up in an alcoholic home and you are uncomfortable with your parents drinking.
Your friends start drinking and you are uncomfortable with their drinking.
So uncomfortable in fact, you start drinking to ease the discomfort.
It works for a time, but then…
You become uncomfortable with your own drinking.
You choose sobriety. Sobriety chooses you.
Again you are uncomfortable with your friends and families drinking.
And to stay sane, You remove yourself from certain social situations, you may isolate, you may disassociate.
But one day you start to do your work, whatever that looks like. You go to therapy, you pray, you work some kind of a program, maybe its yoga, meditation, AA, Alanon. You seek out community, you connect with other people like you.
You tip toe back into communities and gatherings where some drink some don’t.
It is still kind of uncomfortable.
But one day you realize that you can just stay, if you want to, if you choose to.
You can stay with others, and you can stay with yourself, you can be uncomfortable with other people’s vices and behaviors and coping mechanisms, and you can stay for a bit, if you choose, and you learn a whole lot about why its so hard to stay.
You can choose to leave too, and the choice is a clear victory for self-care, not a fleeing but a choice.
You feel generations of trauma unfurling, unfolding, but also rewriting.
And you feel a deep grounded sense of accomplishment, knowing that you are rewriting something.
Your children will never have to cope, hide, or disassociate, or join into your dysfunctional mind numbing. Because you are right there, and they are there too.
Together in your mutual there-ness, you are navigating life as it unfolds, knowing that there are rafts of safety in your community, knowing that you are a raft of safety, and you can all choose to stay, or to go for a bit, and when to return.
You have become a big salty safety barge with big heavy anchors cast into the earth, grounded in slowly yielding waters, and you and your children are rewriting history for their children, and theirs, and theirs.